The most detailed image of a black hole to date.
The black hole image sheds more light on the magnetic fields around the cosmic anomaly.
It took years to make first real image of a black hole , but then everything went much faster. The New York Times reports that the researchers of the Event Horizon Telescope published the most detailed image of a black hole to date. An updated image of the hole in the galaxy Messier 87 shows it for the first time in polarized light, demonstrating how magnetic fields (denoted by the lines you see here) behave at the very edge of the cosmic phenomenon.
The new visuals suggest these fields are strong enough to resist the highly magnetized gas at the event horizon, helping some of the gas escape the crushing gravity in the hole itself. According to Jason Dexter of the University of Colorado, the gas must pass through these fields to get into the hole. According to Michael Johnson, a colleague on the Event Horizon program, the image also suggests that the jet is getting its energy from the rotational energy of the black hole.
The data also allows scientists to estimate that the black hole is a relatively modest eater - it "only" consumes a thousandth of the Sun's mass each year.
You should see more ideas in the future. While the range of EHT telescopes around the world is limited, a future version should be capable enough to produce full video footage of magnetic activity. This should show how magnetic fields extract energy from a black hole and further demystify one of the Universe's strange objects.